Thursday 28 April 2011 10.22 EDT
First published on Thursday 28 April 2011 10.22 EDT

Don King, the most machiavellian of all boxing promoters, had a business motto: "Create confusion." The simple trick of starting a commotion in one corner while manipulating events in another would be familiar to José Mourinho, who delivered an impassioned conspiracy theory in Madrid on Wednesday night in part to distract attention from the sterility of his own tactics against Barcelona.

Mourinho's assertion that Real's enemy are the puppet masters of Uefa's match officiating system is unlikely to be dismissed as mere paranoia in the stands of Stamford Bridge, where Barcelona advanced past Chelsea in a Champions League semi-final that remains memorable for a disastrous performance with cards and whistle by Tom Henning Ovrebo, the Norwegian referee. Up on his self-made cross after Lionel Messi had coasted to 52 goals for the season, Mourinho exhausted the gamut of rhetorical devices to convey sincere indignation and hide his own failure in the face of Barcelona's superiority.

Barring a seismic upset at the Camp Nou on Tuesday, Mourinho has reached a dead end in his first year as Real Madrid coach. To expect him to overturn Barça's dominance in his first 12 months was always optimistic. But anyone who witnessed the melee at half-time, Mourinho's ejection to the stands and the sheer histrionic mayhem of the Real-Barça first leg will have worked out by now that this epic rivalry is not characterised by patience and cool calculation.

At this point on his grand tour of Europe (Portugal, England, Italy and now Spain), Mourinho has landed himself with an image problem. Up in the presidential chambers of the Bernabéu there will be new grumbling about Real's deviation from the stylistic norm. How, the plutocrats will ask, did their disputatious coach expect to knock Barcelona out with 28% possession, in his own stadium – and by leaving Kaká, Karim Benzema and Gonzalo Higuaín on the bench for the full 90 minutes?

Plainly, Pepe's dismissal around the hour mark wrecked Mourinho's plot to blitz Barcelona in the final 20 minutes. But the clan will still ask why he stationed seven defensive players behind three ineffective counterattackers in the first half and posted a dire 29% possession rate up to the interval.

To liven up his team, Mourinho sent on the target man, Emmanuel Adebayor, for the second half, rather than the speedier Benzema or the more cunning Higuaín. In other words, the coach displayed a timid mindset not from the moment of Pepe's dismissal but from the first whistle: a reflection of his belief that the only way to defeat Pep Guardiola's ball-hoggers was to block them off and hope to get lucky on the break.

This worked for Mourinho's Internazionale because their counterattacking was determined and lethal. Real's breakout strategy never got off the ground because Mesut Ozil was innocuous and Cristiano Ronaldo failed to scatter Barça's makeshift defence, in which Javier Mascherano, press-ganged into service at centre-back, presented an obvious weak spot that Ronaldo neglected to exploit.

After the 1-1 draw in La Liga and Real's Copa del Rey win, Mourinho must have felt certain calculated negation and physicality would work again, especially with spirits high from the weekend's 6-3 demolition of Valencia. His refereeing tirade omitted Pepe's stupidity in exposing himself to the risk of dismissal by going in high and late on Dani Alves, a prominent member of the Barcelona amateur dramatics society, of which Sergio Busquets is the president.

So now Mourinho, who once praised Italy as "the home of tactics", has ransacked his own repertoire of opponent-stopping strategies, from pressing higher up the pitch to mass defending and roughhouse tackling, which Barcelona simply nullify with face-clutching theatricality, itself a useful method of loading stress on to the referee. What's left to Mourinho, as he directs the next tear-up from his exile in the stands?

"It's clear that against Barcelona you have no chance," he said, playing the plucky little man, at the world's highest-earning club. "Sometimes I am disgusted to live in this world," he said, sounding like Shostakovich trying to write symphonies in Stalin's Russia. Political self-pity will not wash for long in Madrid, where the Spanish Cup is likely to be this season's only catch. Now, they will demand a more dynamic plan. Dropping Ozil would be a start, with Kaká and Benzema or Higuaín rushed up the line to improve the goal threat.

Not since Roman Abramovich fired him has Mourinho seemed less in charge of his destiny. Barcelona are immovable and overwhelming. There will be days throughout his melodramatic career when organisation is crushed by boldness and his whole modus operandi seems tentative and needlessly self-limiting.

Wednesday was one of those nights. Shorn of his aura as the ultimate managerial field marshal, deep panic overtakes him. He responds to any threat to his reputation by demonising those he believes are arrayed against him.

His undoubted intelligence fails him when he declines to see that he is generating antipathy that can only count against him in battles further down the road. Rafa Benítez, Arsène Wenger, Carlo Ancelotti and now Guardiola are among those who bear scars from the Mourinho claws and he will never shed the "enemy of football" label nailed to him by Uefa's head of refereeing after an earlier Barcelona-based outburst.

In this cycle, at least, bohemian Barcelona have survived the assaults of righteous Real. Mourinho will probably get a second go, next season, but he will need a new trick, a fresh formula, beyond transparent mischief-making, and machismo on the pitch. "The only force that is more powerful than steam, electricity and atomic energy is the human will," he declared on Tuesday, quoting Einstein. A day later he was a scientist lost in a world of art.